Jon - a Tweed Princeton (5F2-A) driving a 12" speaker in a decent sized cab can sound similar to a Tweed Deluxe (5E3), at least in terms of a pedal trying to simulate the "Tweed tone". TheGuyWhoInventedFire hit the high points of the differences in sound. The Deluxe has a bigger sound, more clean headroom but at high volume gets nastier/crunchier a la' Neil Young. The Tweed Princeton can sound really sweet at lower volumes, but it's never really clean. I'd bet that parts of "Layla" were recorded with a Tweed Princeton, but can prove it. Also the single-ended Princeton has less defined/flabbier bass regardless of speaker/cab.
Apologies for the following rant. It just drives me crazy when someone looks at a couple of schematics without understanding how the entire circuit of an amp together with the components used to make that circuit a reality contribute to the tone.
As Christian said, you can't just state that "adding tone controls" does X. There are lots of other differences between the circuits being named here.
Sure, the 5E1 (classic Tweed Champ circuit) does not have a tone control of any kind. The 5F2-A (narrow panel Tweed Princeton) has a single tone control similar to the "tone" control on your guitar. It's a treble cut. Period. Relatively low loss.
The Blackface Fenders have a form of "TMB" tone circuit. Treble, Mids, Bass. Much lower signal loss is the tradeoff for having more control over the frequency output. You say "Wait! The Blackface Champ doesn't have a Mid control!" Sure it does - it's permanenly set at 6.8K, just like the Normal channel on all of the two channel Blackface Fenders.
But the Blackface Champ also has a cathode bypass cap on the second gain stage after the tone stack which boosts that stage's gain dramatically. Why is it cleaner than a Tweed Champ then? It's not so much the preamp circuit, although that contributes to it. The Blackface Champ has a different level of negative feedback which is used to control the accuracy (i.e. lack of distortion) in the power amp. Fender was going for clean tone and more headroom in the '60s, so the output transformer is bigger, the speaker is bigger, the voltages are higher, etc.
The Tweed Deluxe (5E3) is a completely different amp from the single-ended Champs. The difference in wattage output may be irrelevant, but a single-ended amp with 1 power tube cannot sound like a push-pull amp with 2 (or 4) power tubes driven by a phase inverter. They are totally different circuits. Sure, cab size and speaker size make a difference, but the circuits are so different before you even start talking about components that naming tone controls as the deciding factor is silly. Also, the Tweed Deluxe has a Tweed tone control on each channel, i.e. a treble cut just like the Tween Princeton.
I'll stop carrying on. If you can read a schematic, look at the
5E3 "narrow panel" Tweed Deluxe and then look at the
5F2-A Tweed Princeton. They both have a power transformer, an on/off switch, an output transformer (although quite different parts), tubes, resistors and capacitors. Oh, and similar tone controls and both use a 5Y3 rectifier tube. Get the point?
On a trivial note, there never was a "5F1A" circuit to the best of my knowledge.
Chip
